Quotes by Leonard Bernstein

A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
– Leonard Bernstein
Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
– Leonard Bernstein
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
– Leonard Bernstein
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
– Leonard Bernstein
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
– Leonard Bernstein
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
– Leonard Bernstein
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
– Leonard Bernstein
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
– Leonard Bernstein
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
– Leonard Bernstein